Tempest in an Echo Chamber
People are crucifying Google for sharing shared Reader items with your friends.
How absurd. The “share” feature has been there for a long time, and WTF do people expect to happen when they hit “share”? In fact, ever since the “share” feature has existed, that little “share” button has … gasp! … shared the item!
In fact, the default behavior of the “share” button is to SHARE WITH EVERYONE ON THE INTERNET. Yes, complete strangers! EVERYONE! So Google just made that share visible to people on the Orkut friends list, and everyone is in a frenzy? Give me a break.
If anything, this is a spam issue, not a privacy issue. If I were an Orkut user, I might get annoyed at seeing too many status updates from friends wo use Reader. But that’s it — they were already sharing their updates with the whole Internet, so privacy isn’t the issue.